LAS VEGAS - Against the image of the cowboy outlaw that made this old-time casino famous, Patri Friedman stands out like a purple mohawk, which is how he wears his hair.
Accessorized with a stud in his tongue and a safety pin in his left ear, Friedman may look nothing like a typical big-time poker player. But young, smart, aggressive, and apparently fearless, he represents the changing demographics of a game whose grand championship, the World Series of Poker, concluded at Binion's Horseshoe Casino here Thursday night.
Poker continues to grow in popularity, thanks to the explosion of legal card rooms and casinos across the country, the spread of on line gambling and poker software, and the recent movie ''Rounders,'' starring Matt Damon as a young player obsessed with getting to the World Series.
Many of the new players are young. More and more are women. And slowly replacing the Amarillo Slim image of the crafty good ol' boy (although actor Wilford Brimley played again this year, defending the image if not the title) are math whizzes, computer nerds, and high-rolling bankers or bond traders who think nothing of betting thousands of dollars on the turn of a card.
They may lack a lifetime's experience of reading an opponent's face across the table, but they can recite the odds of winning a pot with astonishing, decimal-point precision.
This year's series, which featured 15 title events and dozens of satellite tournaments before the grand finale match of no-limit Texas Hold 'Em poker, a variation of seven-card stud, attracted a record number of entrants and prize money.
For the Hold 'Em championship, 398 people paid $10,000 each for a seat at the table, meaning that when tournament director Bob Thompson gave the command, ''Shuffle up and deal'' on Monday, that clattering heard upstairs in a smoky converted bingo room was the sound of nearly $4 million of chips being stacked, wagered, and restacked.
The winner this year hailed from Clifton Lodge, Ireland. Noel ''J.J.'' Furlong, 61, pocketed $1 million for his first-place finish. The runner-up, 36-year-old New York bond trader Alan Goehring, won $768,625.
Most of the favorites were knocked out early this year. Last year's winner, Scotty Nguyen, busted on the first day. Kevin McBride, who finished second last year, wasn't far behind him. Nor were some of the other big stars of the game: Phil Hellmuth Jr., Johnny Chan, Doyle Brunson, Mike Sexton, and Annie Duke.
Duke, a Concord, N.H., native who now lives in Montana with her husband and two children, has emerged as one of the world's top female poker players. With friends and fellow rounders like Melissa Hayden and Jennifer Harmon as part of a loose support network, Duke and other women are winning the respect as well as the money of male opponents in a still overwhelmingly male game. Duke placed second in a World Series undercard event, Limit Hold 'Em, and took home $110,000 in prize money.
Seventeen women entered the World Series finale this year, a record, but still a small fraction of the total.
Many of those in the finals were relative newcomers, and Goehring, who said he rarely plays in casinos or tournaments, was one of the few entrants completely unknown to the game's regulars.
Aside from a sign that the game is changing, that turnover is one of the beauties of poker, said Hellmuth, a former World Series champ who at 34 now plays professionally. While it's definitely a game of skill, especially in the heady world of no-limit, it's possible for a smart, focused relative beginner to compete, he said.
As dozens of wishful contestants put it this week, where else can a weekend warrior go head-to-head against the game's elite, and maybe win?
That was the dream of Friedman, the Stanford University graduate student with the purple hair. Just 22 years old, he said had never played poker before seeing ''Rounders'' last September.
''On the one hand, they showed all this sleazy stuff and made the life look pretty bad,'' he said. ''But on the other hand, it looked like an intriguing game of skill, and that was the important thing to me.''
So Friedman, a computer scientist with an undergraduate math degree, did something that would never have occurred to Benny Binion, the late Horseshoe owner who started the World Series of Poker in 1970, nor to Amarillo Slim Preston, who won it three times: He went on the Internet to learn how to play. After reading some books and trolling poker newsgroups on line, Friedman said, he began playing for real in October.
Friedman doesn't have the skills yet of a Goehring or a Huck Seed, the 30-year-old Las Vegas pro who is considered one of the game's best players, but he's cut from the same mold: All three came to poker through an affinity for math, a deep understanding of game theory, and an aggressive style of big raising that can annihilate lesser opponents. They all know, for example, that it's a 220-1 shot any player will be dealt a pair of aces as down cards.
In his first game, with a betting limit of $4, he lost $500, a huge amount given the size of the bets. But it wasn't long, he said, before he began improving his game, entering California card-room tournaments, winning some money, and even taking a two-term hiatus from his studies to play poker 25 hours a week or more.
''My parents,'' he said, ''have been very understanding, considering.''
This week, Friedman put up $10,000 to play in the World Series and was knocked out in about 50th place, out of the prize money.
''I have mixed feelings,'' he said Wednesday. ''I'm totally proud of coming here after playing for only six months and finishing in the top 50. But on the other hand, I'm disappointed I didn't do better.
''I can't wait for next year.''
This story ran on page A03 of the Boston Globe on 05/15/99.
© Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.